Sucafina

Sucafina is a green coffee trader: it buys unroasted coffee from farmers and cooperatives at origin, moves it, and sells it to roasters. It is privately owned by the Tamari family, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, and it operates at a scale most of this wiki’s other companies do not — roughly 1,500 staff across 42 countries.¹

“Green coffee” just means the raw seed before roasting. Almost no roaster buys directly from every farm it sells; somebody has to finance the crop, ship it, store it, and carry the risk in between. That middle role is what Sucafina does, and the company’s own shorthand for it is “Farm to Roaster.”

Sucafina turns up on this wiki less as a subject than as a witness. Its public offering pages — the catalogue entries it writes for roasters shopping for a lot — are the source behind much of what these notes say about Carmen Estate, including the farm’s altitude band, its Franceschi family history, and its sale to China’s Dashang Group.

The name is a fossil

“Sucafina” is an acronym of the businesses it used to be in: sugar (“SU”), café (“CA”) and finance (“FINA”).²

None of that is true anymore except the coffee. The company’s own history says that “two generations later, Sucafina is entirely focused on coffee” — the sugar and finance arms are gone, and the name survives them.

History

• 1905 — Jaffa. The family business starts in Jaffa, Palestine, exporting oranges and importing foodstuffs. Bloomberg’s account names the founder of that first firm as Wahbe Tamari.
• Two wars, two moves. The firm is displaced from Jaffa to Lebanon, and from Lebanon to Switzerland.
• 1977 — Geneva. Sucafina SA is founded near Lake Geneva, re-establishing the family business in a neutral country with a deep commodity-finance sector.
• 2022 — a founder dies. Sucafina’s own newsroom published “Sucafina Founder Abdallah W. Tamari Has Passed Away Aged 100,” noting he was born in 1922 in Jaffa.³
• 2026 — still buying. Rehm & Co., a German specialty green coffee importer, joined the Sucafina Group on 7 July 2026.⁴

The Tamari surname is well supported: it appears on Sucafina’s own site, in Bloomberg’s reporting (which quotes Nicolas Tamari on his grandfather Wahbe), and in trade press.⁵ What is not documented is who owns what — see the flag below.

Scale

These are the figures Sucafina publishes about itself. Read them as a company describing itself, not as an audit — but the two independent third-party listings that exist (LinkedIn and PitchBook) agree on the headline numbers.

	Measure	Figure
1	Employees	1,500
2	Countries of operation	42
3	Locations	67
4	Nationalities on staff	60
5	Certified farmers in its network	214,313
6	Washing stations	60

All from Sucafina Group, confirmed via WebFetch. The employee and country counts are separately reported by LinkedIn and PitchBook.⁶⁷

A washing station — sometimes called a wet mill — is the shared facility where smallholders deliver cherry to be pulped, fermented and washed. Owning sixty of them is the tell that Sucafina is not purely a trading desk: it does the processing step itself in origins like Rwanda and Burundi, which is where the difference between a fine cup and an ordinary one is usually made or lost. See Natural process and Honey process for what the alternatives at that station look like.

The group also runs several named brands: Sucafina Green (the green trading arm), Sucafina Instant, Beyers Koffie, TB Brown, and Sustainable Harvest — the last of these acquired outright by Sucafina North America in February 2023.

Where it sits in the specialty world

Sucafina is a volume business that also sells at the top of the market, and the two halves explain each other. PitchBook’s profile has it trading green, steamed, decaffeinated and soluble coffees sourced mainly from Latin America, Asia and East and West Africa into Western Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia. That is commodity work.

At the other end, its North American arm publishes individually-named microlots — Carmen Estate Geisha Natural and Carmen Estate Caturra Fully Washed among them — with farm history, altitude and harvest window attached.⁸⁹¹⁰ This is the part of the business this wiki actually touches, and it is worth understanding what those pages are: sales copy written by the seller. They are excellent on things the seller has no reason to distort (harvest months, processing method, elevation bands) and weak on claims that flatter the coffee (competition placements, scores). The Carmen Estate note flags exactly that split.

Sucafina is not an auction house, a certifier, or a judging body. It does not run competitions the way the Alliance for Coffee Excellence runs Cup of Excellence, and it does not set standards the way the Specialty Coffee Association does. It bids, buys, and resells — the same structural role that puts roasters into a Buying consortium at Best of Panama, just at a thousand times the volume.

Sustainability and traceability

The company’s stated purpose is “to create opportunities to improve lives,” and its vision is “to be the leading sustainable Farm to Roaster coffee company in the world”.² It publishes an annual sustainability report — the 2025 edition, Connected Value, was released 20 May 2026 — and works to seven named sustainability standards.

One concrete, externally-verifiable piece: in April 2026 the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), part of the World Bank Group, issued guarantees supporting Sucafina’s Rwanda operations.⁴ Guarantees of that kind exist to make lending to coffee farmers in a frontier market cheaper, which is a good indicator of where a trader’s money actually goes.

To verify

• Where the company legally sits. Sucafina’s operational headquarters is Geneva. But the Sucafina Sustainability Report 2020 describes Sucafina Holding as headquartered in Luxembourg.¹¹ A Luxembourg holding company over a Geneva trading company is an entirely ordinary structure and probably not a contradiction — but no source consulted spells out the group’s legal chain, so don’t state either city as “the” headquarters without saying which entity you mean.
• Who owns it, and in what proportion. “Family-owned” and “privately owned” are stated by the company; no shareholding breakdown among Tamari family members or holding entities was found in any source. Treat the ownership split as unknown.
• The 2017 300 million loan.** Bloomberg reported a **300 million syndicated loan from banks including BNP Paribas, ABN Amro and UBS, framed around the firm’s then-112-year history.¹² The article could not be fetched — the host returned HTTP 403 — so the bank list and the amount rest on the research report’s reading of it plus a search snippet. Single source, unconfirmed.
• “1.39 billion raised" and the Mercafe Vietnam deal.** [PitchBook](https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/52606-54) lists **≈1.39 billion in total funding and a merger/acquisition with Mercafe Vietnam on 3 June 2024. Both are single-sourced to a paywalled database, and “funding raised” for a trading house usually aggregates revolving credit facilities rather than equity — a very different thing from a startup’s raise. Terms and structure of the Mercafe deal are not published anywhere consulted.
• How many farmers. Sucafina’s own site says 214,313 certified farmers; FLTR Magazine reports “around 200,000 farmers” from company information in 2023. These are probably the same claim at two dates, and possibly two different definitions (certified farmers is a narrower set than farmers worked with). Don’t add them or treat them as a trend.
• Farmer Connect’s status. The research report states that Farmer Connect, a blockchain traceability platform, was launched in 2019 by David Behrends, Sucafina’s Head of Trading and Managing Partner — sourced to a YouTube presentation, which is a weak source for a corporate fact.¹³ Separately, farmerconnect.com now redirects (HTTP 301) to agridence.com, an agricultural supply-chain compliance platform whose site does not mention Farmer Connect anywhere (both).¹⁴ Something happened — acquisition, merger or shutdown — and none of it is documented in the sources here. Do not describe Farmer Connect in the present tense.
• Almost no competition record. The one exception found: Sucafina Việt Nam Co Ltd took third prize in the Robusta category of the Vietnam Amazing Cup 2025, entered from Lâm Hà District, Lâm Đồng Province — as an entrant, not a bidder, and with no score published.¹⁵ Beyond that, Sucafina does not appear in any consulted results table from Best of Panama, Cup of Excellence, the Alliance for Coffee Excellence, the Specialty Coffee Association or the Coffee Quality Institute as a named winning bidder, and it publishes no cupping scores of its own that were verifiable here. Absence from published tables is not proof it has never bought at auction — auction buyer lists are patchy, as the Grand Cru Coffee note shows — but no specific Sucafina lot, price or score can be stated.

Why a trader matters to a wiki about farms

Most of the drama on this wiki happens at two points: a farm grows something extraordinary, and an auction sets a price for it. Almost everything in between is invisible, and that in-between is where a company like Sucafina lives.

It matters for a practical reason. When you read that Carmen Estate sits at 1,650–1,900 metres, or that the Franceschi family came from Corsica in 1800, the chain of custody for that fact usually runs farm → trader’s offering page → roaster’s product page → blog. By the fourth link it reads like established history. It is really one interested party’s account, copied three times. Knowing that a trader wrote it first is what lets you weigh it — and it is why Carmen Estate carries five separate altitude figures instead of one.

Related

• Carmen Estate · Carlos Aguilera Franceschi · Dashang Group — the farm, the manager and the owner whose story this wiki largely tells through Sucafina’s offering pages
• Geisha · Caturra — the two Carmen Estate lots Sucafina catalogues
• Best of Panama · Cup of Excellence · Alliance for Coffee Excellence · Buying consortium — the auction side of the trade Sucafina sits beside
• Specialty Coffee Association · Coffee Quality Institute · Q Grader · Coffee scoring · Cupping — who sets and certifies the quality language traders sell in
• Natural process · Honey process · Anaerobic fermentation — what happens at the washing stations it owns
• China coffee market · Japan coffee market · Premiumisation — the demand end of the chain
• Grand Cru Coffee · Klatch Coffee · Saza Coffee — buyers at the opposite extreme of scale
• ECOM — the closest peer: another family-owned Swiss green coffee trading group, at similar scale

Official links

• Official site — Sucafina Group (corporate)
• Official site — Sucafina (green coffee offerings for roasters)

Footnotes

1. Sucafina Group — official corporate homepage (employees, countries, farmers, brands) ↩

2. Sucafina — About (official history, name origin, vision) ↩ ↩²

3. Search aggregate — Sucafina, the Tamari family and the 1905 Jaffa origin ↩

4. Sucafina — newsroom (Rehm & Co., 2025 sustainability report, MIGA Rwanda) ↩ ↩²

5. FLTR Magazine — How to make sustainability mean more than a marketing buzzword ↩

6. LinkedIn — Sucafina company page ↩

7. PitchBook — Sucafina company profile ↩

8. Sucafina — green coffee offerings site ↩

9. Sucafina — Carmen Estate Geisha Natural offering ↩

10. Sucafina — Carmen Estate Caturra FW offering ↩

11. Sucafina Sustainability Report 2020 (PDF) ↩

12. Bloomberg — Historic coffee trader gets $300 million shot ↩

13. YouTube — Blockchain revolutionizing coffee trading: the story of Sucafina’s Farmer Connect ↩

14. Agridence — platform the former farmerconnect.com domain now redirects to ↩

15. Seven coffee producers recognised for outstanding specialty coffee — Việt Nam News, 28 April 2025 — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the Sucafina Việt Nam third-prize Robusta placing at the Vietnam Amazing Cup 2025 ↩